GitHub: Commit together with co-authors | Hacker News Reader

GitHub: Commit together with co-authors

github.com

39 pointsbrianmario9 comments

GitHub is attempting to standardize a commit message formatting convention for this. Kind of has a certain odor to it.

Can we get cryptographically signed commit integrity into the mainstream instead?

There is already a convention for signed-off by. I don’t understand either why GitHub is pushing for this, though I have seen this feature before on some repositories before the post.

Edit: Now that I think about it, can see why. I have seen merges where is was good enough to merge, but needed som slight adjustments. Rebase/merge with minor changes would be a good use for this, and would allow for better crediting of both authors.

It's not clear to me what the semantics of Signed-off-by is supposed to be, but at least for some projects (e.g. the Linux kernel), it doesn't imply that you are a co-author.

That's what I've seen. Some projects, including the Linux kernel, use Signed-off-by for Developer Certificate of Origin legal processes.

https://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin

It makes sense that GitHub would use something new to avoid stepping on toes, and GitHub's mirrors Signed-off-by in implementation as a git commit message trailer.

The Co-authored-by trailer isn't actually new. In fact it was already being used by over ~1M commits on GitHub before we launched the feature! :)

The git-core commit message conventions docs mention it (https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/CommitMessageConventio...) as do the OpenStack commit message convention docs (https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GitCommitMessages#Including_...).

Using the Co-authored-by trailer is also really useful when pairing, where there is actually more than one author for the content.

This is especially useful when using https://teletype.atom.io :)

I love this! As somebody who quite frequently performs pair programming, this is a great feature. I’ve always found it unfair when only one of the two people got to “keep their streak up”, I mean, it’s a group effort after all!

We use "Name & Name <team@company.com>" during pairs/mobs so we don't worry about who gets the credit and waste time rotating authors. It doesn't look great on GitHub but we usually use an IDE to go through commit history anyway.

It doesn't work great for our open source projects though where visibility on GitHub tends to be more important.

> “keep their streak up”

I think that `how much code has been changed by developer` is not a good metric for performance. There might be weeks when I'm barely writing any code and getting the most work done.

Issue trackers on the other hand can be good to track performance.

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